Our HK Life!

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Hey Tirzah you want to sweep? Sure! How about the living room? Sure! How about the porch? Yep! And the front steps? Yes! There’s a lot of rocks in the street can you sweep that too? Come on Daddy I can’t sweep the street!

Bryan graduated! After sharing life with him for the last few months, we were so proud to see him walk across the stage and graduate. He came to us very introverted with few connections in the school socially, but at the end of the year he was having friends over to our house several times a week. As we started going through transition process with him, he started to realize how connected he had become to the Faith community. Through out the year we got to explore and grow his faith as we did life together. Bryan is an amazing guy and we know that God is going to do some amazing things with him. Moving forward there is a Bryan sized hole in our lives and our kids will miss having him around the table. I (jason) will miss our endless discussions on just about any topics. The kids will miss his un-ending affection. Sarah will miss his delightful interactions and cooking with him.

We jumped in to play season with both feet this year getting ready for Crazy for You. Early in the tech rehearsals, I discovered that my tech team had several interpersonal issues to work through. Two of the guys had some personal issues that had turned into a little animosity between them. They were hoping that they could work around each other and hopefully it won’t be an issue, but it was pretty obvious in their conversation and behavior that this was something that would affect the people around them. Seeing the chance to speak some truth, I challenged them to either reconcile with each other or put the past in the past and not let what happened affect their relationship anymore.

The play is coming up quick and so my class has risen to the occasion and has been really working hard to get things rolling. Our load-in day is next wednesday and so we have been working hard to build various set pieces that we will assemble on stage. In the photo we are beginning the “aging” process because our set will look like it came from wild-west when it is completed… Collaboration is the best thing to pray for us over the next few weeks. There are a lot of moving parts coming together and we need to mesh well for the production come off well.

These last few months Jason has had the chance to begin to speak into the tech world here in Manila. In October, I had the chance to co-lead a hackathon, where we changed philippine techies to come up with solutions to help out the many overseas foreign workers. Some great ideas were hatched and I enjoyed getting to know the guys who came out and it was great to explore the idea of how our Faith and work can connect. God did an amazing job pulling together a great leadership team for the event and I am looking forward to see how God will use our team this year. Our team is looking into the how we can continue develop the Faith and Work connection here in the tech industry here in Manila.

Sarah and many teachers from Faith got to go to a teachers conference at The International Christian School of Hong Kong. The school paid for her flight and the ticket for the conference and Sarah stayed with Wade and Kate Simons who work at the school. Wade and Kate came worked for a year at Faith and so it was great for Sarah to go and reconnect with the family again. Sarah came away from the conference really encouraged and energized. It was great to have some time to think about classroom strategy outside of the classroom itself.